Manage your material If you're the sort that doesn't develop your material in a linear, straightforward fashion (and let's face it: who does?), use Plato to manage your material in chunks that best suit your purpose: paragraphs, chapters, idiosyncratic snips, what have you. You might want to use all of the above and more. You can define your working units (snips, blocks, chunks, etc.), give them names and even assign fields to them if necessary. Then arrange them and rearrange them in folders. Put your folders in folders and rearrange the folders, too.

Manage your subjects In which chapters does the two-bit detective appear? Highlight his name and get a list of the chapters (snips, blocks, chunks, etc.) he appears in. Send everything in the list to a folder and use the live word-in-context display to hop through each occurrence in each chapter.

Manage your words The rich-text field gives a live display of your current character, word, and page count. Does your material cover many text items in a folder? Folder properties will show the aggregate counts of all the text items in a folder.

Manage your output Does one submission need to be double-spaced Courier and another in space-and-a-half Times Roman? Does one publication want footnotes and the other endnotes? Does the math journal want LaTeX and the web publication plain text? Plato scripts can be tailored to deliver almost any number of different output formats with little or no change to your original text.

Manage your sources Using Plato's cross referencing features, you can keep notes (or pictures, contacts, etc.) associated with their sources, whether they be books, articles, people, what have you. Using Plato's bookmarks, you can tag paragraphs or phrases to their sources, and later turn the bookmarks into footnotes, endnotes, or margin notes.

Manage your vocabulary The database concordance keeps a list of every word in your database. The live vocabulary display shows the words used in a particular chapter (snip, block, chunk, etc.). Click on a word to see what other chapters it appears in.

Lawyers Love Plato. Here's Why:

Cross references Interviews, discovery, cases, precedence, and documents can be a real challenge to manage for even simple cases. Plato's extensive cross referencing abilities can keep everything in their proper relations. Summaries and reports can be tailored with Plato's markup and scripts and be delivered as spreadsheets or documents. Unlike most third party software for lawyers, Plato can be minutely configured to match the way you work.

Consultants Love Plato. Here's Why:

Bucks If you generate income by developing expert systems or office automation for your clients, Plato can provide the vehicle for such sophisticated systems with surprisingly little development time.

Soldiers, Students and Lighthouse-keepers Love Plato. Here's Why:

Elegance Everyone who's worth a damn has interests, hobbies, and passions. And some of these interests involve keeping track of information, statistics, names, what have you. Genealogy, vinology, bird sightings, cats, baseball stats, stamps, film vamps--nothing's uglier than that hobby drawer full of lists, scraps, cards, boxes and junk. Plato is elegant. It's the preferred way of keeping track of all the stuff you like.